Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Big Boost Edition 1.1 this weekend -- bug fixes, typos

About a dozen typos and some formatting problems (computer speech not rendering at all in epub/mobi) will be fixed. If you run across something not working, drop me a line.

We'll probably also have reworks of EE/TLR and a new render of Last Dancer -- we've gotten better at producing epubs in particular since the earlier books. If you've ever bought a copy, you should be OK to download the new files, when uploaded. They'll all be marked in the download file name as "1.1".

Don't have a great one yet. I'm talking to Dark Carnival this weekend about possibly doing some small press/POD thing through them, where they'll handl the shipping. If not, I'll work up some deal with lulu or some such and offer some service myself. Be patient.

Dan, I'm not sure what you're using to format or build the epub files, but...

I've bought EE, TLR and AI:TBB from fsand.com, and moved all three .epub files to my Motorola Xoom which is running Aldiko and Coolreader. Neither of them is having any luck. Aldiko basically just locks up when I try to go past the Table of Contents, and Coolreader (on EE) shows only 3 pages (the cover, the Table of Contents, and another cover). I have no problem opening other epub files in either of those readers.

Again, not sure what's going on (as the Xoom is very new to me, as are those apps), but just a "head's up" in case there's something fishy about the epub file format. If I figure out anything further, I'll update you.

We've evolved a testing suite that's fairly thorough, though it doesn't include Macintoshes at this point. (Windows, Linux, iPod/iPad, and Android tablet & phone.) But those early books didn't go through nearly that degree of testing.

I know you're working on fixes to the books for this weekend, but I just thought I'd give you a little more feedback on the problem I mentioned about opening them in Aldiko and Coolreader on Android.

I just tried opening the ePub version of Emerald Eyes in ADE (Adobe Digital Editions, rev 1.7.2.1131) on my Windows PC, and it has the same problem: can't get beyond page 3 (although it does show that it has 215 pages). So it's not related to Android.